Middle Passage [Paperback]

Charles Johnson (Author)

Book Description

Release date: July 1, 1998

Winner of the National Book Award

“A novel in the honorable tradition of Billy Budd and Moby Dick…heroic in proportion… fiction that hooks into the mind.” — The New York Times Book Review

“Long after we’d stopped believing in the great American novel, along comes a spellbinding adventure story that may be just that.” — Chicago Tribune

“It’s a joy to read fiction in which there is a cultivated vision at work...the greatest victory of Dreamer is the light it shines on the life of Martin Luther King Jr.”

—Dennis McFarland, The New York Times Book Review

“In their remarkable simplicity these stories reach into...the African American experience with surprising freshness and the fluency of years of gathered wisdom. This book is a deeply satisfying reading adventure.” — Black Issues Book Review

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

In this savage parable of the African American experience, Rutherford Calhoun, a newly freed slave eking out a living in New Orleans in 1830, hops aboard a square rigger to evade the prim Boston schoolteacher who wants to marry him. But the Republic turns out to be a slave clipper bound for Africa. Calhoun, whose master educated him as a humanist, becomes the captain's cabin boy, and though he hates himself for acting as a lackey, he's able to help the African slaves recently taken aboard to stage a revolt before the rowdy, drunken crew can spring a mutiny. Middle Passage won the 1990 National Book Award. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

A savage parable of the black experience in America, Johnson's picaresque novel begins in 1830 when Rutherford Calhoun, a newly freed Illinois slave eking out a living as a petty thief in New Orleans, hops aboard a square-rigger to evade the prim Boston schoolteacher who wants to marry him. But the Republic , no riverboat, turns out to be a slave clipper bound for Africa. Calhoun, a witty narrator conversant with the works of Chaucer and Beethoven and the Tibetan Book of the Dead, hates himself for acting as henchman to the ship's captain, a dwarfish, philosophizing tyrant. Before the rowdy, drunken crew can spring a mutiny, African slaves recently taken on board stage a successful revolt. Blending confessional, ship's log and adventure, the narrative interweaves a disquisition on slavery, poverty, race relations and an African worldview at odds with Western materialism. In luxuriant, intoxicating prose Johnson ( The Sorcerer's Apprentice ) makes the agonized past a prism looking onto a tense present.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 209 pages
• Publisher: Scribner; First Edition edition (July 1, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0684855887
• ISBN-13: 978-0684855882
• Product Dimensions: 5.3 x 0.5 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (56 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #77,788 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

25 of 26 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Finding Humor in Tragedy January 18, 2004

By Fitzgerald Fan VINE™ VOICE

Format:Paperback

This book was mandatory for my African American Literature course and I am glad that it was. It is impossible for anyone to imagine today what it would have been like for Africans to be taken from the comfort of their homes to be slaves in America. The only thing we could compare it to is being abducted by aliens if you really think about it. They were overtaken by people who looked very different than they did and who spoke an unknown language. They were put into giant ships of the likes they had never seen and many times, they were branded and always chained below decks. Many thought they were being taken to a foreign land to be eaten and often times the slavers would put slaves in groups with different tribes so that they could not communicate or comfort eachother due to a language barrier. They knew nothing of the world around them as people do today. The concept is, in truth, almost impossible to imagine.
Johnson studied about Middle Passage for something like seventeen years before writing this book, not to mention another six years studying maritime science. To be sure, there are a lot of fantastical occurrences within the book but that is why it is called fiction. I believe he does a phenomenal job with the character of Rutherford Calhoun...he's a liar, gambler, womanizer, and thief but there is something about him that puts the reader on his side. You will find yourself rooting for him all the way through the book.
The novel itself is indeed very graphic in description and includes things such as cannibalism so, if you have a weak stomach, BEWARE. The best things about this novel are its extremely dark humor,its fast pace, and its irony. As an avid reader, there is nothing I appreciate more than someone who can take a horrific experience and make it simultaneously poignant and funny. Not only is this a way of putting a face on the early days of slavery but it is a highly entertaining piece of fiction. I would recommend it to anyone looking for adventure on the high seas!

17 of 19 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Historical Fiction? Magical Realism? A Little of Both. January 31, 1998

By Ron Hayes ([e-mail])

Format:Mass Market Paperback

I read Middle Passage over the course of a weekend. This is significant for two reasons: 1)I was to meet Charles Johnson that following Monday and 2) I have a three-year-old and an infant who slowed my reading to a crawl and cut my opportunites to sit down with the book to a minimum. Had I not been so distracted, I would easily have digested Middle Passage in a matter of hours. It is an excellent read. Its protagonist, Rutherford Calhoun, comes off as a latter day Huck Finn, only this time black and educated. The wit and wisdom is very nearly the same.

Despite what other reviewers may have felt, and despite what one may construe as anachronisms within the book, I can attest that such is not the case. I had similar concerns about the novel's historical accuracy and when I finally did have an opportunity to speak with the author, I voiced those concerns. Mr. Johnson assured me of the veracity of virtually every aspect of every detail; he cited the genesis of the scene in which the dead slave is thrown overboard as an example. As an avid (dare I say slavish?) note-taker, Mr. Johnson had apparently done some research for a project having nothing to do with this novel. Indeed, the research notes to which he refers were taken in the early seventies! They came from a police detective friend of his and detailed the effect water had on the human body after death--unusable for the article for which he had originally been researching, but quite useful for the graphic turning point of Middle Passage.

Other evidence, anecdotal and otherwise, proved that Mr. Johnson did indeed have an extensive and authoritative command of American History, the History of the slave trade (made so believable and accurate by the inclusion of the Arabian slave trader in Africa, and by the rounding up of slaves from the African interior--two very historically accurate details),as well as of the ship and her voyage. Thus the exhaustive historical detail is quite effective in the telling of the tale.

One point in which the author and the novel falter lies in the books inability to follow through on its Magical Realist ambitions. Perhaps Mr. Johnson might have included in the dedication an apology to Gabriel Garcia Marquez, most notable and accomplished writer of magical realism. The African god of the Allmuseri is well developed and effectively presented. Its potential for malevolence is a quality keenly felt by this reader and should be noted as an accomplishment on the part of the author. However, the supernatural quality of the unnamed entity deteriorated too quickly into an ineffectual stasis nearly forgotten by author and reader alike; it is only brought back to life to function as a bridge between Rutherford's life at sea and Rutherford's life on land. The problem is that the maneuver is at once clever and contrived and therefore weakened. Mr. Johnson is a clever enough writer. He may simply have gotten too clever for his own good.

Middle Passage is an accomplishment that well represents the National Book Award. It is a well written and finely crafted book worhty of becoming literature. Its foray into the realm of the magical realists is entertaining if only somewhat distracting and should not be considered as a detriment as it does not "undo" anything the author "does". I highly recommend your purchase of Middle Passage.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Rutherford Calhoun comes full circle September 12, 1997

By A Customer

Format:Mass Market Paperback

Perhaps who ever did the review for Amazon.com should read the book again. Rutherford Calhoun does not become the captain's cabin boy, he becomes the cook's helper. He does not discover "to his shock and horror" that the vessel he stows away on is a slave ship since he already knew that from his conversation with the drunken cook in a tavern on shore. What he does learn that shocks him is that on a previous voyage the captain had eaten the cabin boy. Another statement that interested me was one of the promotional quotes in the front of the book, "MIDDLE PASSAGE IS AN EXAMPLE OF TRIUMPHANT INDIVIDUALISM .... Johnson's novel is a reason for celebration." - George F. Will. During the voyage, Rutherford learned that "if you hoped to see shore, you must devote yourself to the welfare of everyone ..." Not only Rutherford, but Squibb, the cook, learned this. Some like the captain did not, but then he ended up at the bottom of the ocean. At one point, Rutherford is describing the Allmuseri, the Africans taken on board as slaves, "Their notion of `experience', I learned, held each man utterly responsible for his own happiness or sorrow, for the emptiness of his world or its abundance, even for his dreams and his entire way of seeing ..." Perhaps this is what George Will liked, but later Rutherford says of the Africans, "... Tribal behavior so ritualized, seasoned, and spiced by the palm oil, the presence of others it virtually rendered the single performer invisible - or, put another way, blended them into an action so common the one and many were as indistinguishable as ocean and wave." The amazing thing about the book to me, is that for Rutherford Calhoun everything comes full circle. Everything he ran away from comes back to haunt him, and he has to deal with all of it.He survives and learns from it all. He is a different person at the end. It was also quite interesting how the Africans were changed by their exposure to the Whites, the brutal treatment they were subjected to and their reaction to it. Not surprisingly, the weakest Africans responded in the worst way, but even the best of the Africans were affected. Not the message George Will would like to read, I'm afraid. The treatment by Charles Johnson of the mutiny by the Africans and its aftermath was incredible on many levels. There were permanent consequences for everyone, and although the Africans "won", there were really no winners, only losers. Johnson's vivid, realistic and graphic descriptions throughout the book pulled no punches. If you have a weak stomach, you probably don't want to read this book. The descriptions of pain, suffering, illness, death and dying were very powerful. There were some parts of the book that didn't work for me very well. First, I find it hard to believe that even a desperate black man would stowaway on a slave ship in 1830. Of course, the whole story is based on this happening. Secondly the business of the mysterious cargo is used for a crucial part of Rutherford's having to face what he has left on shore, but after that we are left hanging about its significance and eventual fate - a bit unsatisfying. All in all, I enjoyed this book and recommend it.